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拍品专文
Landscapes constitute by far the largest number of Rousseau's paintings. Many are fairly small--he would make free oil sketches from nature--but most were composed in his studio using motifs he drew during his long walks around Paris and its environs. He also relied on postcards and engravings of local and more distant sites. In L'Hiver, "Le Douanier" recreates in his own distinctive manner a winter landscape based on Dutch old master paintings. From a series of pictures representing the "Four Seasons" (Vallier, nos. 186-189; see Evening Sale lot __), Rousseau depicts a frozen waterway replete with a skater dressed in 17th Century garb pushing his companion along in a bird-shaped sledge and a towering windmill on the embankment.
In Rousseau's world each person, thing and landscape feature proclaims its individual character. Each building appears like a tiny self-contained fortress, with no apparent pattern or design. Yet all of these components fit comfortably together to form a harmonious and holistic world, a "peaceable kingdom" in which everything has its place, and quietly gets along with everything else. In this democracy of images, each thing possesses its own measure of enchantment.
By 1907, the year in which the present work was painted, Rousseau associated with the avant-garde. He had made the acquaintance of Pablo Picasso--to whom he famously declared that, "we are the two great painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style" --Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay. His work had been exhibited alongside the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and in 1907 he met the collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde who would write an influential monograph on Rousseau in 1911.
Rousseau's realism is an intensely felt literalness, in which he reveals the simple and essential character of his subjects. The critic Gustave Coquiot, one of the artist's earliest supporters, wrote that Rousseau possessed "such style, such inventiveness, such a deployment of rare qualities: and above all he offers such a love, such personal generosity, such a gift of his naked heart, such absence of falsehood, of insincerity, that we can rightly speak of Rousseau's contribution to painting as both generous and unique" (quoted in the C. Lanchner and W. Rubin, Henri Rousseau and Modernism, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 37).
In Rousseau's world each person, thing and landscape feature proclaims its individual character. Each building appears like a tiny self-contained fortress, with no apparent pattern or design. Yet all of these components fit comfortably together to form a harmonious and holistic world, a "peaceable kingdom" in which everything has its place, and quietly gets along with everything else. In this democracy of images, each thing possesses its own measure of enchantment.
By 1907, the year in which the present work was painted, Rousseau associated with the avant-garde. He had made the acquaintance of Pablo Picasso--to whom he famously declared that, "we are the two great painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style" --Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay. His work had been exhibited alongside the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and in 1907 he met the collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde who would write an influential monograph on Rousseau in 1911.
Rousseau's realism is an intensely felt literalness, in which he reveals the simple and essential character of his subjects. The critic Gustave Coquiot, one of the artist's earliest supporters, wrote that Rousseau possessed "such style, such inventiveness, such a deployment of rare qualities: and above all he offers such a love, such personal generosity, such a gift of his naked heart, such absence of falsehood, of insincerity, that we can rightly speak of Rousseau's contribution to painting as both generous and unique" (quoted in the C. Lanchner and W. Rubin, Henri Rousseau and Modernism, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 37).